With diet, modafinil, etc this might already be the case. Sugar alone makes it more difficult to concentrate for many people, as well as having many other deleterious effects. Yet all many people do is say “you can have your chocolate, but only after you take your ritalin”
I’m extremely skeptical of extracting even 1-2 IQ points (in expectation, after weighing up other performance costs) from these mechanisms. Changing diet is the most plausible, but for people whose diets aren’t actively bad by widely-recognized criteria, it’s not clear we know enough to make things much better. For the benefits of long-term stimulant use (or even the net long-term impacts of short-term stimulant use) I remain far from convinced.
It seems true that more research on these topics could have large, positive expected effects, but these would accrue to society at large rather than to the researchers, and so would be in a different situaiton.
I seem to remember that eating enough fruit/vegetables alone raises your IQ by several points.
But rather than IQ, stimulants affects focus and conscientiousness, which is just as important. You can still fail with an IQ of 150 if you can’t sit down on focus on work. I would say the same is true of sugar.
If you can spend more time focused on work, it might raise your IQ as a secondary effect, but this isn’t necessary for a boost in effective intelligence.
I seem to remember that eating enough fruit/vegetables alone raises your IQ by several points.
That seems highly unlikely. Links?
Certain nutrient deficiencies in childhood can stunt development and curtail IQ (iodine is a classic example, that’s why there is such a thing as iodized salt), but I don’t think you’re talking about that.
I’m not sure exactly where I read this, but here are some links with similarly impressive claims (albeit with the standard disclaimers about correlation not implying causation):
Based on parents’ reports, researchers assigned kids to one of three diet categories: a “processed” diet, high in fat, sugar and calories; a “traditional” diet (in the British sense), made up of meat, potatoes, bread and vegetables; and a “health-conscious” diet of whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, rice, pasta and lean proteins like fish.Based on parents’ reports, researchers assigned kids to one of three diet categories: a “processed” diet, high in fat, sugar and calories; a “traditional” diet (in the British sense), made up of meat, potatoes, bread and vegetables; and a “health-conscious” diet of whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, rice, pasta and lean proteins like fish.
…
For each unit increase in processed food diets, children lost 1.67 points in IQ.
On measures of mental sharpness, older people who ate more than two servings of vegetables daily appeared about five years younger at the end of the six-year study than those who ate few or no vegetables.
The obvious question to ask of the first study is whether they controlled for the parents’ IQ (or at least things like socio-economic status).
Indeed. But I don’t have the time to read their papers (not that the article linked to the original paper), and its not my field anyway. From a practical viewpoint, good diet might give significant advantages (if not in IQ, then in other areas of health) and is extremely unlikely to cause any harm, so the expected cost-benefit analysis is very positive.
Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.[230][231] Double-blind trials have shown no difference in behavior between children given sugar-full or sugar-free diets, even in studies specifically looking at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or those considered sensitive to sugar.[232]
The results indicate that children’s performance declines throughout the morning and that this decline can be significantly reduced following the intake of a low GI cereal as compared with a high GI cereal on measures of accuracy of attention (M=-6.742 and −13.510, respectively, p<0.05) and secondary memory (M=-30.675 and −47.183, respectively, p<0.05).
With diet, modafinil, etc this might already be the case. Sugar alone makes it more difficult to concentrate for many people, as well as having many other deleterious effects. Yet all many people do is say “you can have your chocolate, but only after you take your ritalin”
I’m extremely skeptical of extracting even 1-2 IQ points (in expectation, after weighing up other performance costs) from these mechanisms. Changing diet is the most plausible, but for people whose diets aren’t actively bad by widely-recognized criteria, it’s not clear we know enough to make things much better. For the benefits of long-term stimulant use (or even the net long-term impacts of short-term stimulant use) I remain far from convinced.
It seems true that more research on these topics could have large, positive expected effects, but these would accrue to society at large rather than to the researchers, and so would be in a different situaiton.
I seem to remember that eating enough fruit/vegetables alone raises your IQ by several points.
But rather than IQ, stimulants affects focus and conscientiousness, which is just as important. You can still fail with an IQ of 150 if you can’t sit down on focus on work. I would say the same is true of sugar.
If you can spend more time focused on work, it might raise your IQ as a secondary effect, but this isn’t necessary for a boost in effective intelligence.
That seems highly unlikely. Links?
Certain nutrient deficiencies in childhood can stunt development and curtail IQ (iodine is a classic example, that’s why there is such a thing as iodized salt), but I don’t think you’re talking about that.
I’m not sure exactly where I read this, but here are some links with similarly impressive claims (albeit with the standard disclaimers about correlation not implying causation):
http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/08/toddlers-junk-food-diet-may-lead-to-lower-iq
It would help if they said what a ‘unit’ is.
http://www.nootropics.com/vegetables/index.html
These standard disclaimers are pretty meaningful here.
The obvious question to ask of the first study is whether they controlled for the parents’ IQ (or at least things like socio-economic status).
Indeed. But I don’t have the time to read their papers (not that the article linked to the original paper), and its not my field anyway. From a practical viewpoint, good diet might give significant advantages (if not in IQ, then in other areas of health) and is extremely unlikely to cause any harm, so the expected cost-benefit analysis is very positive.
Oh, that is certainly true. The only problem is that everyone has their own idea of what “good diet” means and these ideas do not match X-)
I think most people agree on vegetables, in fact this is one of the few things diets do agree on.
What do you mean?
I mean, if you are oscillating between sugar highs and crashes, it is difficult to concentrate, plus it causes diabetes etc..
Is this what you have in mind?
wikipedia
No, I have this in mind:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17224202
I don’t have time to evaluate which view is less wrong.
Still, I was somewhat surprised when I saw your first comment.
Upvoted for not wasting time!